By the seventh century all that idolatry had meant for the early Christists was reproduced within the Christian Church in East and West. There was nothing, to begin with, in the inner life of the populace in the Christian period that could keep them from the kinds of belief natural to the multitude in pagan times. Only under the stress of a zealous movement of reform, backed up by fanatical power, had image-worship ever been put down for a single nation, as among the Persians and later Jews; and only the original Jewish taboo, backed by the Jewish sacred books, could have kept Christism anti-idolatrous for any length of time after it had passed beyond the sphere of Jewish proselytism. After it had become a State religion, the adoption of images was as necessary to its popularity as the adoption of pagan festivals and rites. Images of martyrs and holy men deceased seem to have been first venerated; and when the bones of such were held to have miraculous virtue, and their spirits were believed to haunt their tombs, it was impossible that their effigies should not come to have similar repute. Dust from Palestine or other holy places, again, was early regarded as having magical virtue--a permitted belief which prepared the way for others. So with the figure of the Christ. From the first, the sign of the cross was held to be potent against evil spirits; and Helena, the mother of Constantine, gave an irresistible vogue to the worship of what was alleged to be the true cross, and to have worked miraculous cures. As early as the fourth century the Christians at Paneas in Palestine seem to have taken an old statue of a male and a female figure as representing Jesus healing the believing woman; and in the sixth century paintings on linen, held to have been miraculously made by the face of the Saviour, began to be revered. Being so different from pagan statues, the "idols" of Jewish aversion, they readily passed the barrier of the traditional veto on idolatry. Here again, however, the lead came from paganism, as we know from Juvenal that many painters in his day "lived upon Isis," then the fashionable foreign deity at Rome. Crucifixes and images of all kinds inevitably followed. Valens and Theodosius passed laws forbidding pictures and icons of Christ; but such laws merely emphasized an irrepressible tendency. As for Mary, her worship seems from the first to have been associated with that of old statues of a nursing Goddess-Mother, and the statues followed the cult, some black statues of Isis and Horus being worshipped to this day as representing Mary and Jesus.